Fiona Pilkington case: Common humanity must be enough to be protected by police

The tragic death of Mrs Pilkington and her daughter is a watershed moment.
It's time to re-commit ourselves to equality under the law, argues David
Green.

A Guardian writer has claimed that the death of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled daughter is a ‘Stephen Lawrence moment for disability hate crime’. If only the police had recognised that Francecca Pilkington fell into a special category with enhanced legal protection, they would have acted with greater urgency. There are now five such categories - disability, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, and transgender. If you commit a crime against a member of one of these groups, you may suffer a more severe punishment than if the crime were against anyone else.

But this incident should be a ‘common-humanity moment’ uniting all of us in a common campaign for a police service that does its duty for everyone, regardless of their group characteristics. Yet, instead of bringing us together to press for better policing for all, victim pressure groups are queuing up to call for better treatment of their own kind.

This is the atmosphere created by a government that never stops campaigning for votes. We are no longer individuals to be served by the government because of our common humanity. To count for anything in the mind of the ruling party you have to be politically useful – preferably a member of a voting bloc that can be bought with the delivery of specific benefits or services. More pernicious still, this vote-bank mentality has been imposed on the police, many of whose members joined the force believing in the now-outdated idea of equal service for all. Fiona Pilkington and her daughter did not count – literally – because they did not fit into one of the categories relevant to the measures of performance that make up police targets and determine the pay of senior officers. As one police officer said at the inquest, the police did not consider ‘low level’ hooliganism to be their job, by which he meant there was no specific target for it.

Politicians and police are now kicking themselves, not because they regret having given a bad service to a fellow citizen, but because they did not realise soon enough that the case fitted a politically-relevant category. Their failure to see that it was a ‘hate crime’ meant that the politicians lost votes and the police lost points under their target regime.

The parallel with the murder of Stephen Lawrence is more apt than disability pressure groups have realised. At almost the same time that he was killed, Rachel Nickell was also murdered on Wimbledon Common. The police botched that investigation too, making even greater blunders than in the Lawrence case. The police did at least identify the murderers of Stephen Lawrence but were unable to make charges stick. In the Nickell case they wasted years pursuing the wrong person. If there was a systemic problem at the time, it was poor quality police investigation, not racism.

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The tragic death of Mrs Pilkington and her daughter has become a watershed moment. We can allow it to be exploited by politically-mandated pressure groups to deepen divisions by enhancing the preferential treatment of sections of society, as the murder of Stephen Lawrence was. Or we can re-commit ourselves to equality under the law. Police officers all swear a solemn oath to carry out their duties ‘with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people’. The Leicester police should have acted with more diligence, not because a hate crime had been committed, but because Fiona and Francecca Pilkington deserved equal respect.